This Is The Dark Side Of Lockdown - More Shameless Confessions

Many are trying to survive in this horrible and tedious period of lockdown. Life is becoming beige. Every day feels the same. If you are one of the (so-called) lucky ones to be working from home, your mainly dull, but sometimes okay job is making you unsatisfied.

The lockdown got me thinking.

The social distancing measures slowed the spread of the virus, but it may also be responsible to a rise of depression and anxiety.

George, a 31-year-old IT professional in London, on lockdown with his ex, worked out how to avoid the one job that most breaks his spirit: washing up dishes.

"Neither of us can be bothered to wash them, so we have been using the very same couple of plates for all meals for more than five weeks," he posted.

"There are some dishes clean enough not to mould, but not enough to be put out of the away. So we are only washing those we have recently used."

Others have entirely lost control of the laundry pile.

Urged to a stay-at-home since mid-March, some of us have been avoiding washing clothes for weeks.

Eventually, though, you ran out of clean stuff to wear. Yet, rather than start the arduous process of loading the washing machine, you come up with the perfect solution.

"I ordered two 3-packs of basic men's underwear. One black and one white, on Amazon," a tweet says.

"I now feel a mix of embarrassment and relief. Like, I know how ridiculous it is that I was not just putting the washing machine on, but, it felt a lot easier."

With the end of week eight of quarantine approaching, housework has become consuming. Spirits appeared much higher for the first couple of weeks.

Social media was filled with pictures of freshly baked cupcakes. People happily posed next to their rearranged spice shelves and deeply cleaned rooms.

But as the weeks in lockdown continue, this mood of domestic ecstasy has changed.

Now, 'jokes' about how the pile to wash-up seems never-ending, and baking is no longer fun, proliferate.

As anyone who worked from home pre-pandemic could tell you, there is a lot more to do when you're at home 24/7. We all create a lot more washing up than when in the office, school and generally out during the day. Stumping on lint and other crap over the carpet as we walk from room to room, and griming up the bathroom as we wash our hands fifty times a day and pee out the relaxing teas.

In response, some are gritting their teeth and doing the extra housework with stubborn perseverance.

But others are so exhausted that they come up with ways of getting around it.

"The more time passes, the more it feels impossible to move if I don't have to. It feels easier not to eat or to eat a bag of crisps in bed."

Mark has a similar lack of motivation, which is turning into a spiral of shame. "I feel the guilt of not cleaning up," he says, "but it's hard to turn that into caring enough actually to do it."

I recently realised I spent most of my adult life in varying stages of chronic depression.

Let me tell you: It sucks.

Very often people have a rather melodramatic concept of depression, that it's keening and sorrowful and involves wan characters writing bad poetry.

But, no. Mostly it's just plain boring. It is typical of how I experience my worst periods of it, and that probably is why it's hard to tell how lockdown has been affecting me.

Everyone is living with depression right now. The monotony, seclusion, the odd sleeping habits, the feeling that dishes are sexually reproducing in the sink tell me that. I used to see all these things as outward symptoms of my inner life, but I've come to realise that they can be the causes and not the effects.

Am I really depressed or just acting like it? Is there a difference? Probably not.

And if the structure of a week or day, sufficiently repeat without differences, can create the sensation that I must be depressed.

And the structure of the world?

Saying that these are challenging times and it feels awful to live in them is barely insightful, but recently I've been questioning if it's not so much the sadness but the sameness.

Watching immoral people prosper time and time again. Having the same conversation about those in power and the consequences they will never face. Witnessing the misery that was anticipated and could have been prevented. Continuously asking what can be done about it and continually being told, practically, "nothing."

For a moment, early on in this terrible crisis, it felt like perhaps this could be a real rupture. But, by now it's obvious the response will be more asking and more answering with "nothing," more suffering, more pointless conversations, more prosperity for a few at the expense of the rest.

Which is all to say that you could solve all that by finding a job you like. So many of us bought the illusion that what pays the bills gives life meaning.

But a lie is a lie.

Are there people out there with careers fulfilled to help them withstand the vagaries of a cruel world? Yeah, of course. Does the majority come from families with enough money to stand up to the whims of a brutal world? Yes, man.

The majority of people have jobs that, at best, are boring. The fantasy that an exciting, high flying career is enough to sustain life is one of the most harmful of our time. You were never going to find meaning there.

We don't find meaning.

We build it, often with others. The only real antidote I have managed to find to a sense of ever-present sameness is to look after to things that grow and evolve: living things. Caring for something alive, something small and pitiful like a plant, if you prefer, a pet; a friend; a neighbour. Be wasteful and unproductive in your search.

We should all take this terrible opportunity we have right now to see what you miss the most, and that's likely where you will find a few things you love.

But whether it's the loss of serotonin-boosters like spending time with friends, the lack of relaxed outdoor activity, existential uncertainty sparked by a scary new virus or the increasing unemployment (or all of them), thousands have been plunged into a state of existential sadness that was once the unique prerogative of those clinically depressed.

That's why mental health experts predict that the number of people living with depression will swell and that an increasing number of people are experiencing the demotivation and exhaustion that characterise it.

"Cleaning feels like something we do for the future, but we are in an even more eternal present than our usual," someone told me. "It doesn't actually seem like there is a future to have to be ready for."

And, anyone who suffered with depression knows, housework become an exhausting burden, rather than a minor inconvenience, when feeling miserable.

Camusean absurdity

Housework is a Sisyphean job in the best of times. You clean things, and they straightaway get dirty again, so you clean them one more time. Then you realise you have to do this forever until you die.

That doesn't seem so unfair when you have serotonin through your nerve cells and some appearance of hope for the future. Otherwise you start seeing it as pointless.

Which is exactly how you feel when you have a mounting laundry pile. Having to continue to wash plates and doing the washing machine while the world burns to strike those as a Camusean absurdity. "Having to do basic jobs feels overwhelming and pointless," they say.

"I started to be ashamed for not taking care of that, and it caused me to start avoiding it, and what it did is making it worse."

That is why Alex is opting, for now, to simply walk around the flat naked rather than tackle the mounting pile of clothes to wash.

"I've only left my flat two or three times in the past 30 days," he explains. "I didn't do the washing machine for more than a month and in all honesty I walk around naked to avoid doing it."

"Because the world is in crisis, things seem to have lost meaning for me," Alex adds. "So I think I'll just be walking around naked for a while longer."